ijdavidson Reviews

The Swearing Jar (2022)

A sweet, soulful movie almost ruined by a undamentally flawed plot

[7/10 · 22 December 2023]

"The Swearing Jar" is about honesty, secrets and lies, and losing and finding love. The swearing jar itself is what's known in cinema as a GIMMICK, namely, a device used to attract attention that isn't really crucial to the plot. Carey (Adelaide Clemens) starts a swearing jar to encourage herself and author husband Simon (Patrick J. Adams) not to swear as part of their effort to clean up their acts in order to be good role models for the child who is on the way.

I find that very few films are worth more than one viewing, but I must admit that "The Swearing Jar" may be worth more than one viewing because the second time through you notice a lot of clues and foreshadowing that didn't register the first time. It also sheds light on the structure of the film, which is not immediately apparent on first viewing. The film is adapted by Kate Hewlett from her musical play of the same name. The film shifts back and forth between an evening of songs - which chronologically is at the end of the film - and the story framed by the songs. Music teacher and songwriter Carey performs her own songs to an audience of family and friends who have gathered for a posthumous birthday celebration for Simon. The songs, which are actually pretty good (the film's soundtrack has been released), illustrate important events in her relationship with Simon.

The usual story of someone who loses a spouse to death at a young age is that eventually they meet someone else and remarry. "The Swearing Jar" is different because Carey actually meets her new love, Owen, while she is still happily married to Simon. Despite her commitment to her marriage and her (completely wrong) promise to Simon that she will never love anyone else, she and Owen feel a powerful attraction to each other, which Carey destroys - temporarily, at any rate - by confessing to Owen that she is married and pregnant.

Carey is a lucky woman, in a way: How many people can lose one love but have the next one already waiting in the wings and ready to go? The story is more complicated than that, but those are the basics.

So what is the plot's fundamental flaw? The flaw is that Simon's death - which is the crucial plot element - is contrived. In real life, it would almost certainly not have happened. Simon is diagnosed with a "berry aneurysm," a colloquial term for a saccular cerebral aneurysm. He is just about to tell Carey, but upon learning that Carey is pregnant, he decides to keep it to himself. The aneurysm is treated as an incurable condition that inevitably causes death. This is not true. The vast majority of berry aneurysms are small and cause no symptoms at all. People usually die WITH, not FROM, berry aneurysms. And of those aneurysms that do cause symptoms or are life-threatening, 80% are curable with "clipping" or "coiling." The plot might have been salvaged if somewhere along the line, someone said that the aneurysm was "inoperable" or "unresectable." Even that would be stretching it, because these days, an aneurysm that can't be cured is extremely rare. So if you can suspend disbelief enough to buy the story that Simon's death is inevitable, you can enjoy this film.

Despite the problems of plot discussed above, the film's dialogue is refreshingly intelligent and truly funny. Adelaide Clemens has a gift of being natural and convincing. She says her lines with an effortless quality that makes them sounds natural. Patrick J. Adams as Simon is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but there is a "bad boy" vibe that gets in the way. Douglas Smith as Owen has terrific chemistry with Clemens. He is in serious need of a good haircut, but maybe the bad hair is intended to be part of his character's persona.

Invasion (2021–2024)

Makes the same mistakes as other similar flops

[3/10 · 3 December 2023]

Alien-invasion SF never seems to go out of style despite the better-than-fair chance that our race will go to its extinction having never detected ANY ET life, let alone intelligent ET life. So here comes "Invasion," which has stunning photography and great music, but also serious flaws.

Why do alien races looking for a planet to settle always choose planets like Earth, where there is not just life with a biochemistry unique to that planet, but that is teeming with life, including billions of individuals of an intelligent species who can fight back? They've seeded the Earth with spores that multiply and release ammonia, which will decimate if not exterminate Earthly life. What then? Why bother destroying all life on a planet in order to replace it with yours? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to find a suitable planet without life, or without hostile life, which it would be a lot less of trouble to transform to your specifications? In the meantime, can they assimilate Earth life's proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and nucleic acids? You don't even have to explore the "Galaxy" to find billions of planets. The volume of space in which our solar system is located is called the Local Arm, or Orion Bridge, which, though it's only a small part of the Galaxy, nevertheless contains at least 800 MILLION STARS. Plenty of places to find planets more to your liking than Earth.

Far too much time is spent on characters' interminable emoting about their unhappiness even as an alien invasion breaks around them. We see a lot more of that than we do of the invasion, which is vague and out of focus. Surely an alien race that can cross space can conquer Earth and destroy humanity in a less bitsy-piece-y way than these aliens are doing. And when we do see the aliens, they don't look like intelligent creatures. You see growling monsters with superhuman strength and speed who roam, seemingly aimlessly, through isolated areas of Earth looking for individual humans to kill, instead of landing alien armies that have a purposeful, professional strategy and tactics and move to destroy or take over strategic positions of power. The most recent films that also got it wrong are A Quiet Place 1 and 2, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Thing from Another World (1951). The works that got it right include "Space: Above and Beyond," "Falling Skies," "Independence Day" (sort of), H. G. Wells's original War of the Worlds, and The Arrival (1996). It turns out that "Invasion's" aliens can be burned to death. Why do they never seem to come up with personal protective equipment that shields them against fire? Are these intelligent aliens actually pretty dumb?

The series introduces us to 1) the chief of police in Idabel, OK, who has a dysfunctional relationship with his job, 2) a dysfunctional family in New York State, 3) some kids from London ALL of whom have dysfunctional home lives, 40 a U. S. Navy Seal in Afghanistan with a dysfunctional marriage, and 5) a dysfunctional female Japanese communications specialist with the fictitious Japan Aviation and Space Administration or JASA (standing in for the real Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA) who is in a particularly foul mood because a) the astronaut with whom she is having a clandestine lesbian affair is launched on a special mission to the ISS and who subsequently perishes in a shuttle accident that turns out not to be an accident, and b) is ignored by the pinhead bureaucrats when she tries to tell them that she's discovered a mysterious signal in transmissions from space. This is all going on as destruction rains down on Earth by an alien foe who seem (as usual, see above) bent on the extermination of the human race and (as usual, see above) the terraforming of the planet to suit the aliens and destroy all native life.

The acting varies from passable to terrible, which I think is more the director's fault than the actors'. I must note how impressed I was that Golshifteh Farahani went through the entire series with the same invariable expression of stunned bewilderment, while Shioli Kutsuna smiled only once or twice while otherwise maintaining a great stone face.

Die-hard SF fans who love space operas - of which this series is definitely one - will probably enjoy it despite its flaws. Other viewers will probably find it unsatisfying.

Awake (III) (2021)

It ain't so

[3/10 · 2 August 2023]

"Awake" purports to be a film about what happens if all humans become unable to sleep. What about animals? Do they become unable to sleep? That's not addressed by the filmmakers. So we have Jill Adams (Gina Rodriguez) playing a former U. S. Army medic and (of course) recovering addict, who works as a security guard at a local college, where she steals drugs from the research lab - because every "research lab" not only has controlled substances, but has them lying around within easy reach, right? - to sell. After her shift, she picks up her children, Noah and Matilda, from their grandmother, Doris. While driving, their car loses power and is hit by another car, knocking it into a conveniently situated lake. Matilda drowns but is revived by a police officer who reveals that everything that uses electricity is malfunctioning. There also happens to be a conveniently situated VA hospital only 4 miles away, which is of course an easy walk right after you've had the trauma of a car smashup and near drowning. There they begin to gather that a) everything electrical is either not working or not working right, and b) as always happens when the electricity goes blooey, everyone has lost the ability to fall asleep.

The filmmakers then come up with all this silliness about what happens with lack of sleep: Everything up to total body shutdown and death. Yes, prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to confusion and psychosis, but most importantly, what you need to know about sleep is that lack of sleep...makes you sleepy.

Rent-a-Groom (2023)

Good if it's late and you need something soporific

[2/10 · 13 July 2023]

This movie is yet another in the well-populated category of "2 people thrown together at the beginning out of necessity, fear of ridicule or happenstance who fall in love by the end." That's quite okay. There's nothing wrong with yet another one. But their sheer number means that any such movie must live up to the standards of the genre or it's a failure. We know the starting point and the destination going in; what we're looking for is an entertaining journey. Well, not here, folks. The script is lackluster, the dialogue tries way too hard but is still lame, the directing is flat-footed and clumsy, and the acting is forgettable. Kylee Bush is attractive and with better direction might do a better job; but her acting talents fail to carry this film. And Stafford Perry is either appallingly miscast or seriously badly directed. Worst of all, the two leads have absolutely no on-screen chemistry. (Think Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. This isn't that movie.)

This one is strictly desperation time for insomniacs. That's a disappointment for all of us who are softies at heart.

Lucy (I) (2014)

We DON'T use only 10% of our brain!

[4/10 · 30 April 2023]

Luc Besson has made several films that have been called "science fiction" but which are actually fantasy, e.g., The Fifth Element: That was a delightful movie, but of course there is absolutely no way that the future portrayed in this film could actually happen. (If you disagree, you're in desperate need of a total reality transplant.)

What's deceptive about "Lucy" is that it's packed with pseudoscientific claptrap that some gullible, impressionable boneheads might actually believe. The main one is that tired old saw that we only use 10% of our brains. As someone who knows better, I'm here to tell you that that is COMPLETE BALDERDASH (a euphemism in place of the word I really have in mind). Every animal with a brain, including humans, uses ALL OF ITS BRAIN, ALL OF THE TIME. Don't fall for that fictitious claim about using only 10% of our brains. Why would organisms waste the energy necessary to keep all of our brain running if we didn't need it? There's also a lot of biobabble about evolution in "Lucy," and ALL of it is wrong. The film, with all the garbage spewed about "evolution," ignores one of the fundamental principles of evolution: An organism's energy balance is tightly controlled. Everything that isn't needed is gotten rid of. That's why the great apes and we humans don't have tails. That's why when we evolved lungs, we got rid of gills. In fact, if you want to name organs that can be both partly or wholly utilized, it's the lungs and the muscles, NOT the brain. At rest, you use only part of your lung capacity. At rest, you use only part of your muscle capacity. But you ALWAYS use ALL of your brain capacity, because that's how the brain is designed. If we only needed 10% of our brains, our brains would be only 10% of their size.

So if you want to enjoy "Lucy" as pure fantasy, go ahead. Just don't fall for the nonsensical pseudoscience. It's. ALL. Wrong.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

Not a great horror flick, but good enough for horror fans

[7/10 · 12 April 2023]

The film's predecessor, simply titled "Ouija," was, to make a long story short, really bad. "Ouija: Origin of Evil" is not really a sequel, and in contrast to the earlier film, a very effective if not terribly inventive horror film. When making such judgments, you have to take into account the deluge of dreck-horror that has polluted America's and the world's screens for decades and have worn out pretty much every horror trope ever filmed; so that being "inventive" and original in the horror genre is an almost unattainable goal. (Of course, you can say the same about almost every other genre of cinema as well.) But here Mike Flanagan has managed to take the usual elements of horror films and piece together a genuinely if only moderately scary flick. I grew up in L. A., and this film definitely has the look and feel of L. A. in the Sixties. A nice touch is that the recently widowed mother in the family is a fraudulent psychic who rationalizes her fraud as giving people comfort. But it is in this house, where Mom lives with her two daughters, that real supernatural evil lies in wait, and possesses the younger daughter. Mom is played by Elizabeth Reaser, who is not quite an A-list actress and who hasn't really been given the opportunity to show off her skills, which is unfortunately also the case here. Annalise Basso, as the older daughter Paulina, is the standout player here, while the younger daughter Doris, played by Lulu Wilson (who these days looks quite grown up) does well with the demanding role of a girl in various stages of possession and grotesque-looking. The underappreciated Henry Thomas has a supporting role as a Catholic priest who works as an educator in a parochial school and who is the first to perceive what is actually wrong with Doris. Although the character of a Catholic priest definitely injects a religious angle into the story, religion does not motivate the plot or the characters. All in all, worth watching if you're the sort of filmgoer who likes this sort of thing.

At First Light (I) (2018)

Very watchable, low-key sci-fi fare

[22 January 2023]

The genre of sci-fi films features some appallingly bad low-budget films. Actually, I'm sorry to say, MOST sci-fi films are appallingly bad, regardless of budget. Sometimes the title alone is enough to give it away: "Moontrap: Target Earth," "100 Degrees Below Zero," "Final Frequency"...also anything with Adrian Paul, Kevin Sorbo or Dean Cain in it, regardless of title.

"At First Light", by contrast, is actually worth watching. This is a very nice, spare, low-budget sci-fi film that makes good use of its minimal special effects. 17-year-old Alex has been drugged by her boyfriend wannabe and has fallen into a lake. She is on the point of drowning when mysterious lights appear in the sky. Miraculously, she not only does not drown, but seems completely unscathed physically by her ordeal. Mentally, however, she has changed utterly: She now seems dreamy and aloof. Then she starts doing impossible things, or impossible things happen in her presence. She is pursued by both the local police and unknown forces. The climax comes at dawn (first light) with a transcendental event that nevertheless leaves loss and sadness in its wake. Nothing particularly original or daring here, but the acting and cinematography are good. All in all, a pleasant entertainment that may not leave the viewer overawed, but also won't leave the viewer feeling short-changed.

Warriors of Future (2022)

Campy

[4/10 · 6 December 2022]

"Warriors of Future" is a Hong Kong product, which you can sort of tell because the actors are clearly speaking Cantonese. Big story, big alien plant from space, lots of CGI, big sound effects, lots of rugged, square-jawed actors who have the same stone-faced scowl they favor in the Chinese period martial-arts lollapaloozas...But you know, there isn't a lot of plot, the dialogue is cliché-ridden, and the whole affair, despite the high-tech setting, has that familiar cheesiness that's typical of Chinese, Japanese and other Asian sci-fi flicks going all the way back to Godzilla and Rodan, the Flying Monster. In fact, the alien plant, code-named Pandora, does sort of resemble a vegetable Godzilla. This is entertainment mainly for young people and immature adults.

Troll (2022)

Not bad

[7/10 · 1 December 2022]

"Troll" is a well-made Norwegian film will probably convince the gullible that trolls actually exist. This movie tries to combine Norwegian folklore with science. The first half of the film is disappointingly formulaic exposition crammed with sci-fi movie stereotypes: Eccentric father; brilliant daughter; fairy tales that turn out to be true; a section of mountain is dynamited by oblivious builders in the construction of a tunnel, liberating a gigantic creature from its 1000-year imprisonment; a skeptical prime minister and military; a helpful government advisor and a helpful soldier who are willing to believe what everyone else refuses to believe; and so on. A couple of scenes are obvious references to "Jurassic Park", and the struggle against the troll that occupies the second half of the film is reminiscent of "King Kong." The CGI troll is well rendered, and the acting is serviceable. The ending is one I should have expected, but didn't, which is a plus.

1899 (2022)

Nobody, nowhere, nothing

[3/10 · 29 November 2022]

"1899" is slow, dark and grueling. It takes place on an ocean liner bound from Europe to New York named the "Kerberos," which receives a distress signal from an ocean liner that has ben lost for 4 months after starting the same voyage. The transmitter-receiver radio equipment on board is an anachronism in 1899, as are the color snapshots someone finds in episode 7.

No one seems to be having any fun at all on the Kerberos. The emotional range of the polyglot passengers and crew varies from panicky to a bit less panicky. In the last 20-30 years physics has been cluttered up with answerless questions about the multiverse and whether our entire universe is actually a computer simulation, and there's some of that in here: Pointless ramblings about reality versus illusion versus simulation. A lot of other ideas are thrown out as well, involving time travel, etc., none of which is really explored. There's the usual ominous child who does not speak, the ship captain who's lost his family tragically, the Victorian-era female doctor whom no one takes seriously, especially when she says she's been trained in the functions of the human brain, some poorly portrayed Victorian-era ideas about the workings of the human mind. There are backward religious Danes, Chinese pretending to be Japanese, Spaniard gay lovers pretending to be brothers and one of whom is pretending to be a priest, a French couple in a loveless marriage...you get the idea. There are numerous cryptic references to the Creator, who eventually turns out, of course, to be one of the main characters, who of course does not remember, having been made to forget.

Above all, there are the spooky ships and the roiling seas, which gives the viewer a chance to compare how the craft of CGI ships and oceans has advanced since "Titanic."

In summary: "1899" has a lot of pieces that don't fit together, an unrelievedly dark, humorless tone, and a plot that essentially goes nowhere.

The Outer Limits: Demon with a Glass Hand (1964) Season 2, Episode 5

Almost 60 years on...

[6/10 · 18 November 2022]

Everyone thought this was a great episode except, apparently, the screenwriter, Harland Ellison. The script was - inevitably - rewritten by the show's writers. Add to that that The Outer Limits was a low-budget show at a time when sci-fi special effects were primitive to say the least. "Demon" was filmed in the historic Bradbury Building in L. A., which you can also see in "Blade Runner."

What strikes me most about this episode is that when it comes to fighting, the Kyban, who are advanced enough to cross interstellar distances and invade the Earth, are astoundingly inept. They strategies and tactics are poor, their bodies are clumsy enough that Trent can easily overpower them, they use ordinary human pistols, and their time-mirror medallions are hung right around their necks. You'd think that at the very least, they could have put them somewhere else, so they would be harder to find and pull off. The other thing, of course, is that his glass hand seems to work just fine as a hand when it's in a glove, but is stiff and immobile when seen. But it was 1964, after all.

Robert Culp was in more than one Outer Limits episode, and he performs a serviceable job here. We also get to see Arlene Martel in a TV role just before she became forever famous to Star Trek fans as T'pring, Spock's wife, in the first episode of season 2, "Amok Time."

Escape 2120 (2020)

Just not enough

[3/10 · 18 September 2022]

There are big-budget sci-fi films, and there are low-budget sci-fi films, and then there are no-budget sci-fi films, like this one. A big budget won't make a sci-fi movie good (plenty of examples of that), and good writing, acting and imagination can make a low-budget sci-fi film good or even great, but with no budget at all, even great writing and acting won't get you very far past the starting line. Add time travel into that and things get worse. Young orphan Dave helps a genially crazy scientist and his wife travel 100 years into the future, but eventually becomes obsessed with the idea of time travel itself and uses their equipment to travel 100 years into the future; except he accidentally travels 700 years into the future. Nevertheless, the people he meets speak perfect 21st-century English. If someone traveled back from 2020 to 1320's England, the language would be all but incomprehensible. And if you learned one 14-century dialect and then traveled to another part of England 100 miles away, THEIR dialect would be incomprehensible all over again. Furthermore, the micro-organisms - bacteria, fungi and viruses - will have had 700 years to evolve, and most likely Dave would not have immunity to the future strains. He'd get deathly ill. Then there's the disappointing fact that all we see of the future is a small patch of woodland and a hill nearby with a system of caves, with people living in houses fitted with very 21st-century door and table hardware. There is very little action and the dialogue slows to a crawl in places. If you feel like your time on this Earth is limited, and you want to spend it enriching yourself, skip this flick.

Kill Mode (2020)

Fasten your seat belts

[2/10 · 15 August 2022]

You feel a little optimistic at the beginning, because the introduction is about a "bacterium" that kills millions of people. In other words, not "a bacteria", since "bacteria" is plural. But oops - that's the last time you hear about a bacterium, because from then on it's a virus, not a bacterium. The Sickness kills 30 million people. There is some confusing plot development involving a girl named Molly, who winds up being quarantined by a rapacious company called The Company because she may be immune and thus deprive them of the mountains of moolah they're raking in selling a cure for the Sickness. I could go into a lot more detail, but the most important thing to know is that 61 minutes of this 97-minute movie are one long chase and fight scene, filmed with handheld cameras using drastically reduced shutter angles for that jerky look, and extremely quick cuts. It's eye-popping, and not in a pleasant way. I wouldn't show this flick to an epileptic.

So if what you're hankering for is to see a VERY long fight scene that bears more than an incidental resemblance to a computer-game fight, this is the film for you. For everyone else: Life is too short to waste time with this movie.

Suburban Gothic (2014)

A lot of unfulfilled potential

[5/10 · 23 June 2022]

In "Suburban Gothic," Matthew Gray Gubler plays Raymond, a starey-eyed (not starry, starey) 20-something white male who finds himself moving back into his parents' house because he's six months out of business school and can't find a job. He's holding out for a position in "upper management," see. This is amusing, because Raymond is the most feckless, most unambitious business-school graduate in history. He must put up with his boorish oaf of a father (Ray Wise) and his clueless, ever-smiling mother (Barbara Niven). Raymond has been sensitive to the paranormal all his life, and when he moves back into his house, he is pestered by ornery spirits in his dreams and when he's awake. There is a plot about a young girl who was killed by her father in 1860 and, unbeknownst to Raymond's family, was buried on the property. Things get squelchy when a crew of Mexican yard workers uncovers the small coffin containing her remains. Raymond meets an acerbic bartender named Becca (Kat Dennings), with whom he teams up to defend his house and his family from being sucked into this black squelchy ghost-thing that appears from time to time. This movie had a lot of potential, and could have been terrific; it isn't: It has some extremely funny parts, especially the dialogue between Raymond and his father Donald, and between Raymond and the wisecracking Becca. Unfortunately, the various parts don't fit together. The plot is shapeless and all over the place. I'd say it's worth watching once to enjoy actors delivering some very funny, hilariously timed dialogue; but that's about all.

Shadows and Fog (1991)

More misses than hits

[5/10 · 18 June 2022]

Woody Allen's career has been very strange. He made some brilliant films when he was younger, after which he seemed to become obsessed with certain filmmakers and film genres. Those who waited for him to branch out into new areas and make innovative creative cinematic choices have been disappointed as Allen has seemed to be stuck in his obsessions. "Shadows and Fog" is another one of his disappointingly derivative films. He's not as bad as Mel Brooks, whose movies after "The Young Frankenstein" have all been atrocious, but it is sad.

Young people who aren't film buffs might not recognize Allen's references - I certainly wouldn't have - so to understand "Shadows and Fog," you need to know two things: 1) it's made in the style of the German Expressionist films of the 1920s, and 2) its screenplay is an attempt at Kafkaesque surrealism, as in "The Trial," one of those novels that everyone has to read in high school and nobody understands. Max Kleinman (Allen) is part of a neighborhood vigilante group organized to catch a serial killer called The Strangler after the police fail to apprehend him. Max is harassed and berated by other members of the group for not following "the plan," but try as he might, he can never get anyone to tell him what "the plan" is, or his part in it. In the same vein, he gets into trouble with his employer, who tells him he is a "detriment to the firm," but you never find out what his job actually is, or what the firm's business is.

If you're a Woody Allen aficionado and are determined to see all his films, this one is worth watching once. There are a few big laughs at typical Woody Allen humor, but it never really comes to life. The film belongs almost entirely to Allen and Mia Farrow as Irmy; although the cast features a small army of film stars and well-known supporting actors, none of them has much screen time.

Y: The Last Man (2021)

Who needs science, anyway?

[2/10 · 13 June 2022]

"Y: The Last Man" begins with a global biological catastrophe: All mammals with a Y chromosome die, except for maybe a few, including a guy named Yorick, and his pet monkey. Yorick is about the last man who should be the last man: He's a 20-something arrested adolescent - immature, self-centered, bratty, blithely ignorant of reality, and completely lacking in any useful skills. The government now consists entirely of women who delude themselves that they can salvage civilization. But the death of (almost) all men and the collapse of civilization are, believe it or not, only minor problems. With all the male mammals dead, the food chain, and with it the global ecosystem, would collapse. Left unanswered is the question, When the pregnant female mammals give birth to male offspring, will they survive, or will they die? Assuming they live, small mammals that reproduce rapidly - rodents, rabbits, etc. - might actually be able to restore their populations after a while, especially if there were no larger predatory mammals to hunt them. But the large mammals, which reproduce slowly - those species would not survive. (That includes us, folks.) Over time, amphibians, reptiles, and birds would move into the ecological niches left empty by the mammals, and fish (and maybe reptiles) would fill the niches left empty by marine mammals. Eventually, a new ecological balance would be achieved; but it would take at least several million years, if not longer. And it's very likely that the human race would be as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Mystery Road: The Road (2020) Season 2, Episode 1

A bit disappointing

[8/10 · 13 June 2022]

The second season of "Mystery Road" is not as good as the first, for the following reasons: 1) Jay is too gratuitously cantankerous, much more so than in the first season, 2) the main plot is hard to follow, 3) they try to tell too many stories at once, and 4) instead of intersecting stories, the parallel subplots are only marginally related. Still, second-rate Mystery Road is still better than first-rate a lot of other shows. Aaron Pederson has genuine star quality. Jada Alberts is terrific as another aboriginal law enforcement officer. It was a bit disappointing (also) not to see. Madeleine Madden as Crystal, who was mentioned but not present. Instead, we get Tasia Zalar, whose character, Shevorne Shields, is only slightly less of an imbecile in the second season than she was in the first.

Pali Road (2015)

Bad

[2/10 · 6 June 2022]

I intended to go through all the reasons why this film is REALLY BAD, but that's been done well by other reviewers, so I'll just say a few things. This film is shapeless, lifeless, and largely incomprehensible. There are a lot of quick transitions between the two alternate lives that don't build toward anything. Michelle Chen has absolutely no screen luster whatever. This looks like some kind of vanity production or a Chinese-backed attempt to make money in the American market. Films like this depend on the impression that the main character looks crazy to the people around her because he or she is trying to make sense of an irrational universe; but Lily, the main character, really does make completely illogical decisions. You think that some nefarious plot to drive this woman crazy is going on because the Henry Ian Cusick character acts evil and ominous, but in fact that's just a red herring, even though there's absolutely no reason for him to act that way. Well, I could go on, but I'll finish up with two medical things that others may have missed: There is a scene where Lily is in a scanner, either CT or MRI, and one doctor says, "This should tell us what we need to know." That is completely wrong. There are all kinds of brain disorders in which the brain anatomy looks completely normal. Second, they talk about deep brain stimulation as a treatment. DBS has been tried only in severe schizophrenia, which Lily clearly does not have. DBS is used for the most part to treat people with movement disorders, like Parkinson's disease or essential tremor, not psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. Conclusion: This limp rag of a film is strictly desperation time for insomniacs.

Goldstone (2016)

Beats the modern American western detective show at its own game

[9/10 · 5 June 2022]

"Goldstone" is not quite as good as the first Jay Swan film, "Mystery Road," but it's still better than a lot of films you could pick out of a miscellaneous assortment on Tubi or elsewhere. Like the first film, it's set in the desert of central Queensland. (Queensland is by no means all desert, but you'd never know it in these films.) The desolate but stunningly beautiful, desolate Outback settings of both "Mystery Road" and "Goldstone" are a remarkable physical match for parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. All the reviewers compare "Goldstone" to modern American westerns, and it's plain that the resemblance is not coincidental. These films could easily be envisioned as being set in the rural American West, except that everyone talks funny and they drive on the wrong side of the road. Australia is distinctly different from the U. S. in many ways; nevertheless, an American should feel right at home with the topics the film covers, including crime, greed. Racism, native dispossession, land use, graft, environmental degradation, bigotry, political corruption, murder, poverty, and people who just LOVE their guns.

The main character, Jay Swan, is an aboriginal detective. There's nothing original about his character: Another brooding, intense detective, whose wife divorced him because he was both physically and emotionally absent for most of their marriage, and whose daughter is a stranger to him for the same reason. Like a black American TV detective, he's a man caught in the middle, accepted by neither the "whitefellas" nor his own race, the "blackfellas." But Aaron Pedersen plays him with an intensity that breathes life into the character. Jay has gone to pot since "Mystery Road": Unkempt, usually intoxicated, clearly a lost soul. He does find a connection with his aboriginal relatives and their friends that he realizes he was seeking. There IS a plot inconsistency in "Goldstone": Jay says his daughter Crystal, whom we met in "Mystery Road," died the previous year, although we never find out how or why. However, for the later Mystery Road TV series, Crystal has been miraculously revived, although she is played by a different actress.

This film, like its predecessor and its later TV adaptation, are highly recommended. Whether you like "Goldstone" or not, you won't feel that watching it has been a waste of time. The star, Aaron Pedersen, appeared in a completely different role, as aboriginal artist Frank Gibbs, in another Australian TV series, "A Place to Call Home," which was a huge hit not just in Australia but abroad, although it was barely noticed in the U. S. It ran for 6 seasons - ideal for binge-watching - and is also highly recommended.

Moontrap: Target Earth (2017)

Where do you begin to review a movie...

[1/10 · 15 April 2022]

...when what's wrong with it is everything? Moontrap: Target Earth opens with Steve (the gorgeous Damon Dayoub), an academic wearing the usual jeans and T-shirt of a typical Hollywood academic, talking to a big auditorium about the slide he's projected: It's a sphinx-like Big Giant Head, which resembles the sphinx-like Big Giant Head in George Pal's 1960 production of The Time Machine. Only this one was dug up in the Arizona desert. It sure looks like it would have stuck up out of the ground considering the shallowness of the excavation around it; but never mind. "Who is she?" Steve asks. He then calls on a stunningly beautiful young woman (Sarah Butler) who has three names but who prefers to be called Scout, who makes a joke that's part of the reveal that the hall is empty. He's just rehearsing his big presentation, which of course is to seek backing for field study and retrieval of the BGH. Steve and Scout embrace, they bill and coo, they make ooey-gooey movie small talk; Steve tells the expectant Scout that he wants to "wine, dine and possibly seduce" her. Of course, you KNOW that, because he said "seduce," she won't be interested in that; this isn't that kind of movie. She's most interested in "dine," because she's starving. She gives him a 5-second critique of his speech. More ooey-gooey movie small talk - all done so painfully slowly that you get impatient as you wait for the next predictable bit of cloying movie-amorous repartee. You've heard it all before, and these two are numbingly dragging it out.

Contrived dramatic interruption: Steve's cell phone rings. It's Carter, another academic and a close friend. He's out in the Arizona desert right now. He's calling excitedly to tell Steve about his incredible discovery, which, predictably, he only hints at. But he DOES tell Steve to watch CNN tonight. Steve, being only a Hollywood academic, doesn't tell Carter that he's concerned that Carter is committing academic suicide by breaking to the news media a discovery that not only has he not published about in the peer-reviewed academic press, but in fact that he hasn't actually STUDIED at all. "It" is a shiny metallic pyramid about 7 feet tall sticking up out of the ground.

As Carter breathlessly finishes the call with Steve, we hear helicopters. Uh-oh, we think. Cliché alert: Carter isn't going to survive this scene. A minute or so later, who should show up but Charles Shaughnessy (from The Nanny) as Richard Kontral (like "control"; get it? Brilliant screenwriting), who dispenses with any subtlety in projecting evilness and threat, accompanied by Nichole, a tall, statuesque blonde woman of few words. And if you haven't figured out what's going to happen next, the steadily building ominous music on the soundtrack telegraphs it also. You KNOW he won't survive this scene; you're just waiting to find out when, how and by whom he's killed. Since there's no other reason for Nichole to be there, it's almost certain to be her. Carter, of course, is oblivious to the danger; he's as happily jittery as a 15-year-old boy who's about to "get lucky" for the first time. He capers around blatting out to Richard that he thinks it's an alien spacecraft that crashed 14,000 years ago, and feel: it's vibrating! It's humming! It's still active! A nod from Richard and, yes, it's Nichole, who strangles Carter with a wire. "What a goofball," Nichole says. Richard immediately berates her for not feeling bad about just taking a human life, although it is "necessary," according to Richard. And that's only the first 11 minutes. It only goes downhill from there. I could describe it, but why prolong the agony?

Not a single second of this glop rings true; there's not a single idea, shot, or line of dialogue that you haven't heard or seen before, and done much better. The only recommendation I can make is that this film would be good for foreign students of English, because the dialogue is spoken slowly and enunciated well, there are LONG pauses between speeches, and there is NO character subtlety to complicate the dialogue.

The Outer Limits: Specimen: Unknown (1964) Season 1, Episode 22

Dumb, dumb, dumb

[10 April 2022]

"Specimen: Unknown" (S1 E22 of the original Outer Limits) was the highest-rated episode of the original series, and I admit it has some good parts. But it's also one of the DUMBEST episodes in a series that excelled at ominous dopiness. The scientists of Project Adonis, a research station in orbit 1,000 miles above the Earth, find some fungoid-looking things - "space barnacles", they call them - adhering to the station's hull and bring them in for further examination. They speculate that they are some kind of alien spores that have been just "floating around in space for millions of years." This is ALIEN LIFE we're talking about, and they treat them as casually as if they were Earth mushrooms. They don't keep them in sealed containers; they don't use isolation and containment glove boxes to handle the specimens; they casually handle them with their bare hands, and keep them in what look like modified coffee cans; they don't pack them securely when it's time to return to Earth. Even after one of the scientists is killed by one of the plants - which of course is unwitnessed by the rest of the crew - they don't do anything to change their handling of the mushroom-shaped organisms. All these safety measures things had been thought of, designed and invented when the show was filmed. But of course, if the plants hadn't "gotten loose," there would be no (dumb) story, would there?

Settlers (2021)

Nothing Martian about this dismal dog of a film

[1/10 · 22 March 2022]

"Settlers" is about settlers, not surprisingly. This is a frontier story that is a lot like other frontier stories, except it takes place on Mars. Except THIS Mars is warm, has a thick, breathable atmosphere, Earth-strength gravity, liquid water, an Earth-distance horizon, an Earth-distance sun, and hills where you can clearly see sedimentary rocks on a planet that hasn't had oceans for at least a couple of billion years. In other words, there's absolutely nothing to distinguish this movie from any other film about settling a lawless and brutal frontier except that it's supposed to take place on Mars, and there's nothing about the setting or the action in this movie that looks like Mars except that the characters say it's Mars.

There are films that call for the willing suspension of disbelief, which is fine; and then there are movies - like this one - that require that disbelief be not just suspended, but put on permanent leave. Are we supposed to believe that Mars has been terraformed? Even if the technology existed to achieve that, it would take about a million years to complete (a conservative estimate). I'll wager that the likelihood that humans will still be around in a million years is mighty slim.

The actors are mostly attractive, especially the stunningly beautiful Sofia Boutella. But no amount of acting skill can rescue this preposterous nonsense.

Nine Minutes (2017)

They're going WHERE to do WHAT?

[21 March 2022]

David Gerrold, who wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles" and became fairly closely associated with Star Trek: TOS, once told a story about reviewing story ideas from screenwriters who were total ignoramuses when it came to astronomy. One pitched the story, "The Federation is in crisis due to an imminent eclipse of the galaxy." When he stopped laughing, Gerrold explained to the writer why his story idea was utter nonsense. Well, that's the disgusted laugh you laugh when you read the first words on the screen of "Nine Minutes": "The United Earth Space Administration has sent out astronauts to the far corners of the Universe in hopes of discovering a solution to Earth's energy crisis." Right away, the filmmakers have let us know that they possess a 2nd-grade understanding of space SF. To quote Wikipedia, "While the spatial size of the entire universe is unknown, the cosmic inflation equation indicates that it must have a minimum diameter of 23 trillion light years, and it is possible to measure the size of the observable universe, which is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter at the present day." So much for sending astronauts to the far reaches of the Universe. And there are a dozen different ways to solve Earth's energy crisis right here in our own solar system. Solar energy, either on Earth or in space; materials that are exotic on Earth but abundant in the asteroid belt...Workable FUSION energy is far less fantastic than sending astronauts to "the far corners of the Universe."

So the premise is idiotic. What about the film itself? Each mission has just ONE astronaut. If there's anyplace where the buddy system will keep you alive, it's in space. But not here, because that would ruin what passes for drama. It starts out with a very picturesque failed liftoff from what appears to be a desert planet with pillars of something in the landscape. Salt? Rock? Sugar? Anyhow, astronaut Lilian manages to eject safely. Bravo 2 crashes behind a rock formation, leaving Lilian sprawled on the ground near her parachute, with no one but her AI M. A. R. C. to talk to. "Nine minutes" refers to her oxygen supply. We watch Lilian emote and listen to her talk as time runs out, but believe it or not, we're bored. This short film starts with a ridiculous premise and then peters out entirely.

Constance Wu is miscast as the astronaut: Her girlish, petulant voice ruins the lines she is saying. Reggie Watts does a good job with the voice of M. A. R. C. the AI. If you've ever seen pictures of Reggie Watts, you'll find it hard to believe that that voice came out of a guy who looks like two unmade beds.

Phoenix the Warrior (1988)

Poor Persis Khambatta

[1/10 · 9 March 2022]

Poor Persis Khambatta. This stunningly beautiful actress did not leave us with a long (or even a short) catalogue of exceptional films. She will always be remembered as the Deltan Lieutenant Ilia in 1979's "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (which, let's face it, wasn't that great of a movie either), but other than that, she appeared in a handful (12, to be exact) of films that were mostly eminently forgettable. And none of them was more forgettable than "Phoenix: The Warrior," aka "Warriors of the Wasteland." As one of the film's thumbnail summaries puts it, "Big hair, big guns and a serious lack of wardrobe. A post-apocalyptic story that features women who leave little to the imagination as they do battle in junkyards and gravel pits."

It's tough to review a movie when what's bad about it is everything. Where do you start? The preposterously nonsensical plot? The hopelessly flat-footed dialogue? The even more hopelessly amateurish acting? The grotesque hair? The clownish makeup? The hysterically skimpy costumes? The bad-home-movie production values?

Why did Khambatta take this role? Was it to pay the bills? Was it the only work she could get, at least in the States? It's so sad: She had a disastrous combination of a chain-smoking habit and bad genes that led to her needing a coronary bypass operation at the age of 35. Despite the operation, she went on to die of a massive heart attack only 10 years after she made this dismal dog of a movie. R. I. P.

Save Yourselves! (2020)

More a yuppie satire than an invasion movie (the spoilers are mild)

[6/10 · 17 March 2021]

"Save Yourselves!" is an intermittently hilarious comedy about two clueless thirtysomethings who are just not up to the challenge of an alien invasion. The invasion is only the gimmick for a satire on the trendy urban millennial lifestyle.

Jack and Su are a cohabiting couple who live in a Greenpoint apartment more or less permanently tethered to their phones and computers, living a life of typical effortless, unthinking, self-involved consumption. It's what "Mad About You" would be like if you replaced Paul and Jamie Buchman with, say, Joey Tribbiani and Phoebe Buffay.

When their friend, the terminally cool Raph, offers Jack and Su a week at his cabin upstate near Pine Woods, they decide to use the opportunity to "go offline" and reconnect with each other and their lives - and few New York couples are less connected to their lives than these two. As luck would have it, the day they arrive at the cabin just happens to be the first day of an alien invasion. The filmmakers make inspired use of their small budget to add humor to the movie by creating aliens that look ridiculously un-alien. In fact, they look like pouffes, that is, overstuffed footstools covered with carpet, sort of like overgrown tribbles. ("Where did that pouffe come from? Was that there before?" "What's a pouffe?").

But the funniest thing about the movie is the contrast of an alien invasion with the utter banality and fatuousness of Jack's and Su's dialogue. When they finally, belatedly, realize that Earth is being invaded, they also realize what the viewer could tell all along: that they're utterly, hopelessly, disastrously lacking in even the most rudimentary practical skills, from chopping wood to driving a stick shift. When they talk about what life might be life in the future, the vapid Jack says that he'd like to be one of the people who helps "rebuild the Internet."

Jack and Su stumble through an interminable, vacuous debate about whether they should hole up in the cabin and wait things out or get on the road and out to the coast, where, they are told, rescue awaits. The argument ends when they realize they have only enough food for 3 days and when they see pink, purple and brown pouffes gathering in the woods outside the cabin. However, it doesn't take long after they get onto the road into town that, through bad luck and their own dimwitted blundering, they wind up wandering aimlessly in the woods, having lost all their possessions - their vehicle, supplies, food, tools - and having picked up a fussy baby to boot. There is no climax, just a denouement that's meant perhaps to underscore that Jack and Su are clueless to the end: In the woods, they come upon what is clearly an alien artifact that looks something like an 8-foot-tall gummed-up spider web. Instead of staying strictly away from it as any sane person would do, they approach it, and discover, too late, that it's either a trap, or a transport vehicle, or both. Jack and Su's fate remains unrevealed as the movie's indefinite end comes, with the look of an ending that's meant to hint at a sequel. If there WERE a sequel, going by the ending, it would be about Jack and Su being just as clueless as in this film, only on another planet.